Facebook New App “Moments” Focuses On Privacy

People moved from different social networking sites like Orkut, Hi5, and Myspace to Facebook because it offered more privacy to users. Although Facebook has been hailed a lot of times for maintaining user privacy standards, some of the features on the world’s biggest social networking website have not been used for the purpose they were built for.

One such feature is Lists. Lists were aimed to let user add people in specific lists, so that they could share specific content with specific people. For example, if you wanted to share a post with your family members and not others, you would add your family members in a List named say “Family” and set your post-sharing option to this List.

But it was a hectic task for lazy people like me, and majority of the Facebook users are lazy. Mark Zuckerberg revealed back in 2010 that only 5% of users had used Friend Lists. The stats showed that although Facebook’s intentions were to provide more privacy control, users didn’t want to go extra mile to set up Lists.

To solve this issue, Facebook made changes in Friend Lists in 2011. They started creating lists of your family, coworkers, and friends automatically, with an option to create more lists such as Acquaintances and Close Friends. This saved lazy users from the hectic task of setting up lists.

Now, Facebook is making a further step in this regard. TechCrunch believes that Facebook is working on a new app codenamed “Moments” which is aimed to ease users in sharing private content with the people of their choice.

How will this app help you? If you have ever accidentally shared a status which wasn’t meant to be seen by everyone, or if you have been embarrassed by friends’ comments on a post which was also seen by your family members, or simply if you want to share selective content to different sets of people, then this is the app for you.

Our source who’s seen Moments likened it to the mobile app Cluster, which lets people create safe “spaces” for sharing content with small groups of people like family, best friends, high school buddies, or co-workers. Moments will similarly let people share to different subsets of their total friend list using a more visual design.

The app is currently in testing phase and we are unsure when it will be launched. It will have an interactive design to let users easily select lists of people. It features a grid with tiles and each tile represents one list for example Friends, Family or Coworkers. So when you create content, you can select the list from its tile and the post will be shared with those people only who are in that list.

Moments is a codename used by Facebook employees and it is possible that the app will have a different name when it is launched. It is also possible that Facebook never launch this app as they have scrapped off some projects in the past as well.

We believe that this app will certainly help frustrated, embarrassed and lazy people which cover 95 percent of the total Facebook user-base.